


These Boots and Garters

by Kestrealbird



Category: Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: Cu being a thirsty hoe, Diarmuid's excellent fashion choices, Fluff, Humor, M/M, Trans! Diarmuid, i hashed this out in two hours holy shit, is this pre-relationship or established you decide, it was meant to be a quick drabble but alas, look these two just needed more content, pray for CasCu's dick tbh lmao
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:20:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25617988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kestrealbird/pseuds/Kestrealbird
Summary: The problem is not that Diarmuid spends their money, but rather that Cú doesn’t stop him from doing so as often as he should.He’s regretting that a lot right now.
Relationships: Cú Chulainn | Caster/Diarmuid Ua Duibhne | Saber
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23





	These Boots and Garters

**Author's Note:**

> DiarCu in general doesn't get a lot of content but CasCu and SaberDia are such an A+ version of the ship and yall are sleeping on it so here I am to deliver to goods. You're welcome

Despite the many perceptions about his lineage, Diarmuid didn’t harbor any ill feelings towards offering his own services for simple coin. Granted these services tended to be of the unlawful - and often _murderous_ \- sort, but he got paid in coin all the same. Cú had asked him about that once and Diarmuid’s cheerful response had been that, “coin was better because you can argue the price, but there'll be no bartering with someone who offers a goat and nine of their inlaws’ fingers.”

He’d very quickly dropped his questioning after that.

The _point_ was that Diarmuid loved _spending_ coins almost as much as he liked _earning_ the damn things. Which wouldn’t be a problem, necessarily, if Cú ever found enough left by the end of the day to get them a decent room _and_ a good hot meal, instead of having to decide which one he’d rather have more.

Sometimes it was neither, as a bath tended to be a far more pressing manner more often than he’d like to admit to anyone, least of all himself. He supposes that’s his own fault for not getting an extra pouch when he had the chance so they could both have their own separate funds.

But he’d like to challenge anyone who travels with Diarmuid for more than a week to say they _wouldn’t_ do the same; sharing funds means one of them has to carry the pouch, and this chore falls on Cú’s shoulders, which means that, whenever Diarmuid wants to buy something, he has to either sneak the pouch away while Cú is otherwise occupied (bathing. While Cú is _bathing,_ which is the only time he doesn’t keep it within arms’ reach, despite knowing that Diarmuid is inevitably _going_ to steal it) or he _has_ to ask Cú’s permission to buy whatever it was that took his fancy.

To an outsider this might seem like an incredibly unfair thing, but it was a system they’d devised fairly early on in their travels together, because Diarmuid was self-aware enough to know that anything else would be a detriment to the both of them, and this way Cú could make sure he didn’t end up buying anything he didn’t actually _need._

It wasn’t often that Cú said no, however, because (and this was why he challenged _anyone_ who’d want to travel with Diarmuid for more than a week) Diarmuid was...well. Gorgeous would be an _understatement,_ and when a man as gorgeous as him - who is also _criminally_ allergic to the possibility of wearing anything that covers his admittedly well-toned stomach - a gorgeous man who has a _naval piercing_ for God’s sake, and whose stomach is softer to the touch than it appears - bats his eyelashes and clings to your arm and asks in that deceptively sweet voice if he could _please_ have that creepy looking doll, I swear it’s not _actually_ haunted, well. 

You don’t say “no,” even if you _know_ the doll will eventually end up haunted one way or another. That’s just how their life is, and he’s still not entirely sure who’s more to blame for it.

It probably doesn’t help that he has an ongoing attraction for his friend, which seems to get worse with every day that passes, and is becoming increasingly more difficult to ignore. Not that he wants to hide it, of course; it’s just the lesser evil compared to how relentlessly Diarmuid will tease him over it should he ever find out and that’s something Cú Chulainn could very much live _without,_ thank you very much.

So, the problem is not that Diarmuid spends their money, but rather that Cú doesn’t stop him from doing so as often as he should.

He’s regretting that a lot right now. 

In his defence, Diarmuid had brought a lot of expensive boots during their time together, and while the heeled menaces had always served active roles in some of Cú’s more private fantasies, they’d never looked _quite_ this provocative before. 

He hadn’t known that it was possible to buy boots that had to be held up by a corseted, leather garter, but you could, apparently, and he was trying _very_ hard not to focus on how said corset fit so snugly around Diarmuid’s hips, stopping just short of covering his piercing, the straps connecting it to the knee-high boots doing very little to draw Cú’s attention away from how mouth-wateringly _thick_ Diarmuid’s thighs were in comparison to the softer muscles on his stomach and arms.

 _Christ,_ what he wouldn’t do to have those things squeezing either side of his head, Diarmuid’s heeled ankles digging into the knots of his spine, hands tangled in Cú’s hair as he arched off of whatever flat surface Cú could find to -

Diarmuid smooths his hands down the corset, a frown on his perfectly black lips, and Cú shakes himself of his thoughts, glad that his robes are loose enough in this position to hide the sudden _problem_ between his legs.

“Do you think this is too much?” 

_No,_ Cú thinks, _but the corset could be pulled a little tighter._ “It’s fine,” he says, covering the hoarseness of his voice by taking a long gulp of the warm cider they’d been given as a gift for saving the local sheriff’s daughter. Not that she’d needed much saving, in Cú’s opinion; she’d seemed perfectly fine flirting with the harpy that had kidnapped her, who’d been more than willing to send her back to the village, looking more than a little mortified that they’d kidnapped the _one_ person who happened to find monsters particularly attractive.

He supposed it was rather difficult to frighten someone with your talons around their throat when they were too busy trying to woo you into their skirts to care about the danger.

Cú respected the girl’s choices, of course; he’d had enough romps with monsters over the years that he was hardly in a position to judge her tastes, let alone scold her for them.

“How much,” Cú asks slowly, trying to decide if it was better or worse that the whole leather ensemble was a deep blue instead of the usual black or green, “did it cost you?”

“Oh,” Diarmuid says, “just a couple dozen gold.” He clicks his heel against the floor experimentally, then rolls on his foot from the heel to the toe and, satisfied with whatever weird testing he was doing, takes off his shirt and Cú takes a _very_ deep breath through his nose.

“Is that really necessary,” he says tightly, heat rushing to his cheeks even as he averts his eyes from the sight.

“Uh, yeah, it is.” 

He’s going to regret asking this. He knows that, but he does it anyway. “The shirt you had was fine. Why bother changing it now?”

“Because,” Diarmuid says, as if patiently explaining something to a child, “it didn’t match the overall colour scheme.”

“Colour scheme,” Cú echoes, rolling his tankard between his hands just to give himself something else to focus on. 

A shirt whizzes past his ear, hitting the wall behind him and then falling into a scrunched up pile on the bed. It’s a sleeveless polo-neck that he’s only ever seen Diarmuid wear once, back when they first met each other, and it’s quickly joined by four other shirts, all of them cut to show off Diarmuid’s stomach. 

Cú is most familiar with the green one; it has one long sleeve on the left that got torn all the way up the seam a few months ago, and then put back together using buttons instead of thread. On anyone else it would’ve looked absolutely ridiculous, so naturally this meant it looked amazing on Diarmuid.

Maybe he harboured just a little bit of jealousy over that. _Just a little bit._

A shirt is held up to Diarmuid’s chest, which Cú only knows because he can just about see it out of the corner of his eye, and the colour is one he hasn’t ever seen before so, curiosity winning out over his flustered response to seeing naked tits, he turns his head to get a proper look at it and is genuinely surprised to learn that the thing has both sleeves perfectly intact. 

What a miracle.

“What do you think?”

“I mean,” Cú shrugs, “it’s...purple.” Which he assumes is intentional, given that the soft cotton trousers Diarmuid is currently wearing are also purple, but it’s hard to tell sometimes - Diarmuid tends to be very fickle about his fashions, dressing in more elaborate layers than Cú has ever seen in his life, even among the royal courts.

He has yet to determine if this is a general trait of the Good Neighbours or if he can chalk this up as another of Diarmuid’s strange eccentricities. 

Diarmuid clicks his tongue - which is _never_ a good sign about anything - with a frown and throws it onto the pile on the bed. Cú doesn’t even have to avert his eyes to protect them from sudden boob, because Diarmuid quickly turns his back to him and bends himself over the table to drag his bigger bag towards himself, giving Cú a perfect, mouth-watering look at the garter belts that curve up his ass. 

It’s torture is what it is and he has to drain the rest of his cider just to cope with it. 

“I need something else,” Diarmuid declares. “Even if I have to buy -”

“No,” Cú protests immediately. “You’ve spent quite enough for the both of us.”

“Oh, please,” Diarmuid scoffs dismissively. “We have enough money left that I could buy three more pairs -”

“Which you _would,_ ” Cú interrupts, “if you had _your_ way about it.”

“Yes, well,” he says, “I don’t so I guess we’re _both_ just going to have to suffer.”

“What do you mean ‘both of us’? _You’re_ the one who insists on carrying a city’s worth of clothing with you.”

“You’ve never complained about it!” 

Which isn’t true at all, actually, because Cú Chulainn has complained _extensively_ about it for many, many hours, he’s just never done it to Diarmuid’s _face_ before. “Count this as complaining then,” he decides and stares mournfully into his empty tankard when Diarmuid straightens up with a triumphant noise, cutting off Cú’s perfect view of those garter straps curving up his ass.

“This one is _much_ better.”

It looks exactly like the previous shirt, just with more embroidered detailing on the cuffs and collar. It’s even the same type of silk, so it’ll hang loose instead of tight, and Cú vainly hopes that Diarmuid bothers to wear something underneath it because it looks quite _thin,_ and he’d really rather not have to deal with everyone catching an eyeful of something he doesn’t think they’re entitled to seeing.

He immediately winces at the possessiveness of that thought process and very healthily blames it on the cider.

The garter boots are still the most distracting thing about the entire outfit; he finds himself restraining his impulse to reach out and touch the leather - to flatten his palm against it and slide his hand slowly up the calves to grab the straps and use them to pull Diarmuid into his lap - hopefully without snapping them in the process, if only because he’d never hear the fucking end of it otherwise.

It’s a very tempting impulse; they _do_ have an important formal engagement, though, so he can’t think about it too much lest his problem become too noticeable and Diarmuid become insufferable as a result, so instead he licks his very _dry_ lips and stands up with a flourish and a sigh, rolling his eyes when Diarmuid darts forward to straighten out his own silks and velvets, batting away his friends hands when Diarmuid reaches up to fuss with Cú’s hair.

Diarmuid huff's at him, but relents anyway, grabbing a fur coat ( _also_ purple, and when the hell did he even pick _this_ one up?) to give the illusion of being affected by the night’s chill.

Cú contemplates leaving his own behind - it’s not like he _actually_ needs it, since everyone and their ancestors knows he can heat up his own skin enough to melt the snow itself - but then he thinks about how he’ll have to look at Diarmuid’s garters all night - at the way the straps curve up his thighs and over his ass and the corset sitting snugly on his hips - thinks about how distracting it’s going to be to see the blue embroidery on his shirt, how his darker complexion is going to inevitably end up flushed by the end of the party from all the free drinks he’ll be relieving from the other guests.

He thinks about how Diarmuid will inevitably end up just tipsy enough that he’ll lean too far into Cú’s own space, giggling into his neck with cold breaths that send more than one type of shiver down his spine, and how all of this will do absolutely _nothing_ to help hide his _problem._

He grabs the stupid coat and resolves to keep it on all night, if only so Diarmuid doesn’t end up pressed too tightly to his own skin. 

(He has no way to defend himself against those boots, he finds out later, but given how the night ends, he can’t bring himself to be _entirely_ upset about it, even if Diarmuid _does_ tease him relentlessly afterwards.

It was worth it, of course, to feel that leather for himself.)

  
  



End file.
